Never Cry
by sing-oldsongs
Summary: April Ericsson writes poetry. She listens to classical music. She has the perfect touch. She tells him that she never cries. PreRENT. RogerxApril.


_**Summary**__: April Ericsson writes poetry. She listens to classical music. She has the perfect touch. She tells him that she never cries. Pre-RENT._

_**Disclaimer**__: I do not own RENT, it characters, including and especially Roger, April, and Mark, or it settings._

**x**

April's guilty pleasure is classical music. She plays it all the time in her apartment, a small square space filled with slim poetry books and notebooks covered in thin flowing script. Roger can't stand it. He tells her that it moves too slow.

She lies down next to him on the creaky, depressed mattress that serves as her bed, and reaches over him to turn up the sound on her stereo. It's an impressive piece of equipment, that stereo, the one really nice thing that she owns—she is oddly proud of it, and of the days without electricity, barely eating anything, wearing holes through her old shoes, that went into paying for it.

She closes his eyelids, now, gently closes his eyelids, and rests her hand gently over his face and whispers in his ear _just listen._

He does, for hours, but he doesn't hear a note. All he can do is feel her touch.

**x**

The first thing she said to him was "good show tonight."

He got that sort of empty compliment a lot. It was the first thing Mark had said to him, too, when he was still just a thin, nerdy-looking blond boy with a camera, and Roger had to keep himself from laughing at how odd he looked walking the city streets. Yet there was something in Mark that Roger was drawn to the moment they met, and he felt another, twisted version of that feeling when he first saw her.

He had noticed her from the stage. She stood out, a bright face in a dark crowd, and he was glad to stay with her, glad to order a couple of drinks and talk. She was no ordinary girl. She wasn't the sort of person you were lucky enough to meet every day.

She told him she was a writer, that the subtle cadences and rhythms of poetry were her life. But music was her passion, and they spoke of it for hours, every night, as Roger's band packed up their equipment and all of the other patrons left. She liked the bass line in that new song last night. She thought the bridge needed work, though. The chorus was amazing. The lyrics made her want to cry.

He shook his head. "Then it's not good enough yet. You're supposed to _actually_ cry."

She laughed a little, a small, almost taunting laugh, and reached out one hand to touch his cheek. In anyone else, the gesture would have been awkward.

"You learn something new about me every day, Roger Davis. I never cry."

**x**

Mark doesn't know anything about music. Roger asks him, sometimes, always forgetting the last time: "What do you think? I've been working on it all week."

"It has a nice…tune?" Mark tries.

"All it _is_ is a tune."

"Oh. Well, it's nice."

Roger shakes his head and tells Mark to go out and film someone doing something interesting. Then later, when Mark tries to tell him about his latest project, Roger tunes out his voice and says something like, "it sounds great," without even bothering to try to sound sincere.

**x**

One day he catches April with a needle in her skin. She tells him it's nothing. He tells her it's certainly something, and don't lie about that, and why didn't she tell him.

_Naïve little boy_, he thinks—_believing that we had no secrets_.

He storms out, but ten messages and three shows later, on a rainy day in the same month from which she got her name, she's tracing his veins with her soft, familiar touch, and he's holding the needle in his hand.

**x**

"She lied to you," Mark says. "Don't ruin your life on her."

"I'm not!" he answers. "I'm—I'm living for the first time!"

Mark shakes his head, but he won't argue anymore. Roger slams the door behind him, and never sees Mark with his head in his hands and his eyes squeezed shut.

**x**

The truth is, she did lie. She told him once, smoking his last cigarettes, beneath the darkened lights of the club he used to play in, but doesn't anymore, because the band is gone and his fingers feel stiff against the strings—she told that she never cries.

But he sees her now, small in the corner of that mattress, shivering and sweating, and for the first time, for the first time the room is silent. The stereo is gone. There is an empty needle on the floor, just at his feet. And she is crying. April Ericsson, who never cries, is shedding beautiful tears from her beautiful eyes.

She says she doesn't want to talk about it. She says they'll talk tomorrow. And even though she lies he still believes her. He still loves her even after the water in the bathtub turns red.

**x**

end


End file.
